‘Or she might not be able to hold back and confess before summer even comes.’

Damon let out a short, light laugh and looked at McCoy, still hanging from his arm. She was now openly pulling his arm against her chest and rubbing herself against it.

In the middle of doing so, McCoy glanced up to check his reaction, and her eyes met Damon’s dry, indifferent gaze. Her shoulders flinched.

“Oh, um…… That is……”

There was no need for her to explain herself. If McCoy played dumb, Damon intended to ignore it. But she seemed to have no intention of letting the moment pass.

And Damon was already well aware of the kind of atmosphere she was building. When he spent time with young ladies at their invitation, there were occasions where they lost control of their desires and threw themselves at him without warning. Just like right now…….

“Young Lord Damon, I really like you……!”

McCoy threw both arms around Damon’s neck without warning and pressed her lips to his.

He was the subject of every filthy rumor about a man who turned no one away and let no one go, but the truth was that Damon had little appetite for situations like this one.

To put it precisely, he found purely one-sided advances distasteful. Like Nate O’Hara, who never once worked up even a shred of the nerve McCoy just showed.

Damon peeled McCoy off him without much effort. She was moaning alone as she sought his lips.

“Hah, Young Lord…… I, I……”

McCoy stared at Damon with a flustered expression. He spoke before she could say another word.

“This is far enough for the send-off, Miss McCoy.”

With that, Damon turned his back on her. He felt her gaze on him, watching without end from behind, but he did not look back.

Once he was fully out of her sight, Damon took out a handkerchief and wiped his lips. His expression was not a pleasant one. Whether it was because McCoy pressed her lips to his without his consent just moments ago, or whether there was some other reason, he could not say.

Though it was strange, even for him, to be in a bad mood simply because he kissed a woman. He had always mixed freely with many women without hesitation.

Before boarding his carriage, Damon tossed the handkerchief at the waiting attendant.

“Throw it away.”

He said it quietly, then stepped straight into the carriage. The sound of the attendant closing the carriage door followed, and the carriage began to move. Damon looked out the window with a blank expression and muttered in a flat, dry tone.

“Nice to have a little peace for once. It was uncomfortable running into her at every turn after turning down her confession.”

The person Damon was talking about was not McCoy, who had just been with him.

“Though I doubt her resolve to give up will last very long.”

Nate O’Hara was the only person who ever confessed to him and then declared she was giving up on him. Damon kept his indifferent expression, leaned his head back against the carriage sofa, and closed his eyes.

The carriage ran for a good while longer before stopping in front of the Preston ducal house. Damon stepped inside to find Duchess Evelyn pacing the hall, and she rushed toward him. He greeted her with a composed expression.

“I’m back, Mother. Were you waiting in the hall……”

But he had to stop mid-sentence.

Crack.

A sharp, cutting sound rang through the silence. Damon’s head snapped to one side. Evelyn stood with a frantic expression, her voice bursting out in frustration.

“Damon, where on earth have you been? Did you go somewhere questionable again? What would you do if you got kidnapped?”

Damon slowly turned his head back. He briefly touched the cheek Evelyn struck, then raised his eyes. Her unstable gaze was fixed on him. He stared at her coldly, then answered a beat late.

“Not somewhere questionable. I was at the Lovitz Marquisate. I planned to go hunting with Young Lord Lovitz.”

Damon’s quiet voice filled the space. Evelyn seemed to come back to her senses, and she stepped back with a start. Then she lurched forward and tried to touch the cheek she struck.

“Damon, I was worried about you……”

But Damon shook off her approaching hand.

“Do you still see me as a child, Mother?”

He asked, his voice cold. Evelyn stared at him with wide eyes. Damon met her gaze and smiled with an expression of pure exhaustion.

“Pull yourself together.”

Damon walked past her. Evelyn called after him in a desperate tone, but he already crossed the hall and set his foot on the stairs leading to the upper floor.

He went straight to his bedroom on the second floor and sent every maid and attendant inside out.

Left alone, Damon sat on the sofa without a word. He pressed his hand over his eyes, suppressing his emotions. On his left cheek, a faint red mark from Evelyn’s fingernail was visible.

“D*mn it……”

Damon murmured quietly, eyes pressed shut. Seeing Evelyn in that state reflexively brought the past rushing back.

He remembered being kidnapped as a child by a lower-class criminal organization. A girl around his age was taken with him at the time, but by great fortune, the Preston ducal house launched a sweeping investigation and they were rescued quickly, before anything dangerous could happen.

Still, it was a major incident, and the aftermath was unavoidable. Damon managed to recover well enough, but his parents did not. After the kidnapping, they grew extremely anxious, and as a result, Damon spent much of his childhood essentially confined to the estate. Their influence was a large part of why he came to crave freedom so deeply.

Damon lowered the hand covering his eyes.

“I wonder if that girl is doing all right, like I am……”

His thoughts naturally drifted to the girl who was taken with him. In the chaos of that time, they parted without even properly exchanging names. Damon was searching for her in secret, without his parents’ knowledge, but had not found her yet.

Before long, Damon rose from his seat and told a servant to bring him the imperial palace party invitation that arrived recently.

“Since it’s an imperial palace party invitation, one must have been sent to the O’Hara County as well.”

He skimmed the invitation the servant handed him and muttered in a dry tone. The subject of his thoughts was Nate, who had been grating on his nerves since the Lovitz Marquisate earlier. Of course, Nate had done nothing directly wrong to him, but Damon chose to ignore that fact.

“No doubt she’ll stand there with that prim little face of hers and cry the moment I show up with another woman as my partner.”

Telling me she won’t like me anymore, while wearing the face of someone who clearly hasn’t given up at all.

Thinking that far, Damon found himself, somewhere beneath his awareness, thinking it might not be so bad to see that expression on Nate’s face.

And it did not stop at a thought. His brow twitched and he glanced down at himself. The front of his trousers was visibly straining, stretched taut. The outline of his long, thick c*ck along his right thigh showed clearly even through the fabric.

Damon did not look particularly bothered. Like this was nothing new.

“Got slapped by my own mother and my c*ck’s still like this.”

He muttered to himself with perfect calm, then walked back to the sofa and sat down without any intention of dealing with his *rection or covering it up. Damon hummed to himself as he looked over the invitation in his hand.